Dad said nothing for the rest of the afternoon. He said nothing when we tried to distract him with tea and talk while Gloria got her first aid kit. He grimaced silently when Gloria applied the dressing to his cut. He said nothing when we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him. He didn’t eat the banana cake with condensed milk icing. When I said goodbye, he remained still and stiff as I wrapped my arms around him in a hug.

I wished there was a way I could access the filing cabinet of his mind and keep track of which memories were being lost and when. I knew there was no way of retaining them on his behalf, but I longed to understand what version of the world he was seeing at any given moment. If he thought I was a fifteen-year-old preparing for summer exams, what else in the seventeen years of our relationship since had been wiped? So much of the love you feel for a person is dependent on the vast archive of shared memories you can access just by seeing their face or hearing their voice. When I saw Dad, I didn’t just see a seventy-seven-year-old man with black-and-grey hair, I saw him in a swimming pool in Spain teaching me how to front crawl and I saw him waving at me in a crowd on graduation day. I saw him dropping me off for my first morning of primary school and leading a conga line around the living room at a Christmas Eve drinks party in our flat in Albyn Square. But what would happen now that only I could access that shared archive of our history? What would he feel for me and what would I be to him as these memory files dwindled from his side? Would I become just a thirty-two-year-old woman with brown hair and a vaguely familiar face, standing in his house, offering him food he didn’t want?

I walked to Pinner station. The next train wasn’t for fifteen minutes, as was characteristic of London zone five tube stations. I sat on the platform bench, took my phone from my bag and redownloaded Linx, desperate for a distraction. I flipped through 2-D humans like pages of a catalogue, reading meaningless declarations of identity: ‘love socialism, hate coriander’; ‘SARCASM IS MY RELIGION’; ‘always big spoon ;)’; ‘Mancunian Aquarius’; ‘my weakness is an inteligent women’; ‘is it weird that I always brush my teeth in the shower?!’; ‘next on my bucket list: the Grand Canyon’; ‘dogs are better than humans!!’; ‘I have a thing for girls with their hair tied back’; ‘interesting fact about me: I have never been on a tram’; ‘COYS!!!!!!’; ‘love me some pubbage on a Sunday’; ‘would rather die than eat a mushroom’; ‘I have lived in ten countries and thirteen cities’; ‘when people ask if I’m a legs or a boobs man – I’m a pussy man!!!!’; ‘working in the emergency services but also writing a sitcom’; ‘Carpay Deium is my mantra x’; ‘DETOX TO RETOX’; ‘Korean cinema, rainy days, strong tea’; ‘msg me if u got a fat ass and tiny titties with puffy nips’; ‘pineapple does NOT belong on a pizza!’; ‘poly, pansexual sex+’; ‘NO REMAIN VOTERS, PLS’.

All these hobbies and preferences and politics and history – were those the essential ingredients of a human? Were those the pillars of ego and id? If these declarations were the construction of a self, then Dad was in the long, slow process of dismantling and destroying his. He couldn’t remember where he was born or his favourite meal, his daughter’s name or the students he’d taught. What would be left of him as the knowledge, predilections and memories accumulated over a lifetime – so precise and vivid – were removed? I thought about what Mum had said – that who you are is just what you wake up and do every day. I hoped that she was right.

I took the train from the suburbs into central London where I was meeting Katherine for dinner. It was the first time I had seen her since I’d gone to her house to meet the baby. She had since been mostly unresponsive to my texts and ignored all my calls. Once every ten days I would get a message that was frantic in tone with no punctuation and many typos which, cynically, I suspected to be strategic to further make a point of how rushed and stressed she was. She claimed that messaging had become ‘impossible’ because she never had any hands free now she had both a toddler and a newborn. Her Instagram content, however, continued to thrive daily.

She was sitting at the table when I arrived, scrolling on her phone, her face tight and twitchy. She looked up and gave me a thin half-smile.

‘Hi, I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

‘You’re half an hour late.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. I did send you a text to let you know. I’ve come from Mum and Dad’s and you know what the trains are like.’

‘I’ve come from Surrey.’

‘All right, mate, I’m sorry, as I said. You know me, I’m never late normally.’

‘I’m never ever late for you either.’

‘That’s because you can’t be late because we usually meet up at your house, so you never have to go anywhere.’ Her head jolted as if caught by a cold gust of wind – she was unused to this sort of candour from me. ‘Which is understandable, of course, because you have young kids but just … can you give me this one, please? It won’t happen again. I’ve had a really horrible day.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ll bore you with it later, I need a glass of wine first. Shall we get a bottle?’

‘I’m not drinking.’

‘Okay.’

‘You go ahead.’

‘I will.’ I caught the waiter’s attention and ordered a large glass of Chenin Blanc. ‘Sure you don’t want one?’

‘Yes, Nina, I’m sure.’

‘I was just checking.’

‘You’re not really meant to while you’re still breastfeeding. And I’ve just really enjoyed my body feeling clean and pure during pregnancy, so I thought I’d carry on.’

‘Is Mark drinking?’

‘Of course he is,’ she said.

There was a slightly too long pause. I wracked my brain for a question to ask, but thankfully she got there first.

‘How was the launch?’

‘It was nice,’ I said. ‘You were missed.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, I just couldn’t get out of Anna’s birthday.’

‘Who’s Anna?’

‘You’ve met Anna – Mark’s school friend Ned’s wife. They’re local to us.’

‘I thought you said you couldn’t leave the house while Freddie was that young?’

‘I could for a few hours, Mark’s mum babysat him. I just couldn’t come into town.’

The waiter placed the glass of wine in front of me.

‘What are you doing on July the sixth?’ she asked.

‘Don’t know,’ I said, taking a large sip and letting the cold, honeysuckle liquid anaesthetize me back into trusty, taciturn passive-aggression.

‘Okay, can you check when you’re in front of the diary because we’d like that to be the date of the naming ceremony for Freddie and Olive.’

‘Will there be a sorting hat?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing, it was a joke. Sounds like something from Harry Potter.’

Her face was expressionless. ‘It’s just a secular christening.’

‘Okay.’

‘Can you let me know tonight as soon as you’re home? Because I want to be able to confirm all the godparents can come before I book the venue.’

‘I will do.’

‘So what’s up with you, anyway?’ she said, opening her menu. ‘Why have you had a horrible day?’

‘It was Dad’s birthday lunch and he was in a bad way. Didn’t recognize me at one point. Kept asking for his mother, who’s been dead for twenty years. Then he tried to open a tin with a chopping knife and cut his hand, there was blood everywhere. Thankfully, he didn’t have to go to hospital.’

‘Oh dear, everything’s very dramatic with you at the moment, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Every time I meet you it seems there’s another big drama.’ She looked up from her menu.

‘Katherine.’ I took a deep breath. I couldn’t believe I was finally going to say it – the speech I’d been angrily rehearsing for months, that I never thought would be spoken anywhere other than when I was alone in the shower. ‘I may not have a baby. But I do have a life.’

‘Of course I know you have a life.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘You don’t. You don’t ask me about it, you don’t take it seriously, you don’t come to my home, you don’t take any interest in my work, you couldn’t even come to my book launch when I had no family there. You’re my best and oldest friend and not only did you not want to be there, you didn’t even feel a sense of obligation to pretend to want to be there.’

‘I’ve told you, it’s because I couldn’t come all the way into town for the evening.’

‘So you thought you’d go to a party where you could talk about babies and weddings and houses all night. Because not everyone wants to talk about babies and weddings and houses at a book launch.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It is true. You couldn’t just be my friend for one night, celebrating my work. I have to celebrate when you get your kitchen retiled, but anything I do is trivial and meaningless because I’m not in a relationship and I don’t have children. I don’t know what’s happened to make you so relentlessly dismissive of anyone whose life isn’t exactly like yours, but you need to sort that shit out.’ I slammed my glass slightly too dramatically on the table and wine spilt.

‘I don’t need you to celebrate everything in my life!’